U.S. President Barack Obama has selected former journalist Shailagh Murray to serve as his new senior adviser and former Twitter TWTR executive Jason Goldman to a new position as Chief Digital Officer, the White House said on Tuesday.

Murray has served as Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director since 2011 and had also taken on the role of deputy chief of staff. She worked previously for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

The wildly ambitious future of the job search

For years, businesses across America have groused that they can’t find enough qualified workers, while others have questioned whether the “skills gap” is a myth.

Amid this tired debate, it’s easy to miss the fact that many of the smartest people trying to shape the working world have moved on. They have begun to view the problem as an information gap between companies looking for capable workers and individuals struggling to land a decent job.

Driving this shift is the belief that both workers and companies stand to benefit if it’s easier for them to identify each other—and if they’re also on the same page in terms of the skills and training required to fill particular positions.

“The idea is to make all of this simpler, less expensive, and more automatic” for the employer and the employee, says Byron Auguste, co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a new nonprofit aimed at “rewiring the U.S. labor market.”

This concept lies at the heart of TechHire, a public-private initiative that President Obama announced last week to help companies place people—many of them invisible to recruiters—in high-paying IT fields such as cybersecurity, network administration, coding, project management, and data analytics.

“If we can get the architecture right, I think we can make a lot of headway in getting employers to hire skilled people they’d otherwise overlook,” says Auguste, who until recently served in the White House as deputy director of the National Economic Council and had a lead role in designing TechHire.

Building platforms to connect job seekers with openings is hardly new, of course. U.S. newspapers have been running “help wanted” ads for more than two centuries. Monster.com has been around for 16 years, LinkedIn for 12.

What’s happening now is that new ingredients are being steadily added to the job-matching mix, promising to produce a more efficient and effective marketplace. Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital are pouring into the space.

In the case of TechHire, which is launching in 21 regions, the objective is to create an ecosystem—populated by organizations such as Code To Work, the Flatiron School, LaunchCode, and others—to help employers articulate the specific skills that their workers must possess; bring job candidates quickly up to speed on the right stuff, often by having them participate in “coding boot camps” and other nontraditional educational offerings; and then put the two sides together.

TechHire faces significant hurdles. Some of the entities involved with the effort are small, having trained and placed just a few hundred workers so far, and there’s no guarantee that they can get to a large scale. Meanwhile, to take advantage of the network as an individual, you need to plug in, and more than 20% of American households lack regular Internet access. Financing high-potential, low-income talent is also a challenge. Even with the Obama administration pledging $100 million to help “people with barriers” receive training, the program is likely to remain out of reach for most of the nation’s poor; even the boot camps that TechHire is touting can cost $10,000 or more.

Still, there is palpable excitement at the prospect of a more transparent and fluid job market. Google’s Vint Cerf, widely considered one of the “fathers of the Internet,” envisions a massive databank that showcases people’s unique strengths, allowing employers to pull in just the right folks to tackle any task. “Instead of matching people to jobs, you match jobs to people,” says Cerf, who is active in the i4j (or Innovation for Jobs) community. Its goal: “disrupting unemployment.”

To some degree, what Cerf is calling for is already happening. ClearFit, for example, lets companies analyze their best performers and then search out applicants that have similar qualities. On ClearFit, employers are not only sent someone’s job history; they also receive the results of an online assessment that provides an instant sense of a person’s drive, capacity to withstand stress, tolerance for risk, preference for structure, interest in others, and 15 other characteristics.

“This takes you beyond the resume,” says ClearFit founder Ben Baldwin, “and gets to personality, motivation, and cultural fit”—giving the worker and the employer a better chance of having a successful relationship. ClearFit’s clients include small businesses, such as restaurants and car dealers, as well as Fortune 500 companies.

LinkedIn wants to take an even more ambitious step. The professional networking site, whose membership includes roughly 350 million of the world’s 780 million professionals and students, is trying to develop an “economic graph” that would digitally profile every one of the 3 billion-plus workers around the globe—whether they’re investment bankers in Manhattan or ditch diggers in the Sahara.

The economic graph would also feature every company on the planet—all 70 million or so of them—and a digital representation of every job available at these enterprises. It would detail the skills required to obtain open jobs at these companies and highlight educational institutions teaching those relevant skills.

“The dream, the vision, is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, recently told a group of executives convened by the Aspen Institute. An instrument like this, he added, has “never been imagined before, let alone executed on.”

Some are sure to dismiss the economic graph as pie in the sky. But there’s already plenty happening on the ground to suggest that technology won’t just kill jobs; it will enable people to secure them, too.

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. The author or editor of five books, he is currently writing a narrative history of how the social contract between employer and employee in America has changed since the end of World War II.

Maybe the Obama Admin is right about free trade after all

The chances of the Obama Administration scoring any kind of major policy victory this year took a big hit when it became clear that there would be a bipartisan movement to torpedo his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement if it didn’t include protections against currency manipulation.

At first, it looked like the opponents of TPP had the evidence on their side. After all, Americans, and their elected officials, have been focusing on wage stagnation. After all, free trade efforts have not been helped by the fact that the proliferation of free trade agreements has coincided with a decades-long stagnation in wage growth.

Opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership are now zeroing on currency manipulation, arguing for stronger protections to prevent trading partners from artificially driving down the dollar value of their currencies to give their exporters an advantage. In a recent study, economist Robert E. Scott estimated that the U.S. has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to places like Mexico and South Korea due to a lack of protection against currency manipulation.

Those who argue against free trade agreements often point to the fact that the nation’s flagship deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, coincided with a huge increase in America’s trade deficit with Mexico in particular. Before NAFTA was signed, the U.S. had a slight trade surplus with Mexico and a $30 billion trade deficit with Canada. Today, the trade deficit with those two nations totals more than $180 billion.

But in a new report from the centrist think tank Third Way, authors Jim Kessler and Gabe Horwitz argue that while NAFTA may not have “lived up to its promise” of boosting the U.S. economy, trade negotiators have become more adept at including higher labor and environmental standards in the many trade deals that followed NAFTA. The result, according to Kessler and Horwitz, is that the vast majority of trade deals signed into law by Congress in the 21st century have shrunk, rather than increased, the trade deficit and therefore have helped create jobs. They write:

While some 20th Century trade deals didn’t always live up to their promise, deals in the 21st Century have generally been negotiated with higher standards making them a better proxy for the likely impact of new deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this paper, we analyzed all of the U.S. trade agreements that went into effect since the turn of the century—with 17 countries in all since 2000. Because the U.S. has such a consistent and overwhelming trade surplus in services, in this paper we looked only at whether these deals improved the U.S. balance of trade in goods. Our analysis found the following: nearly all recent trade deals have improved our balance of trade in goods, and in the aggregate the gains have been substantial.

They find that trade deals with 13 of 17 countries since the year 2000 have led to a decrease in the trade deficit, and that in the aggregate, “the balance of trade for goods improved after implementation by an average of $30.2 billion per year in 2014 dollars.”

Such evidence could help convince wavering Congressmen to support TPP, a trade agreement that would cover 40% of the global economy and is a pillar in the President’s plan to bolster America’s influence in Asia. But disagreement over the effects of trade agreements, with supporters pointing to post-2000 deals and detractors pointing to deals with places like Mexico and Korea—which seem to have been bad deals for U.S. workers—shows the limitations of using economics as a policy guide.

The global economy is a very complex engine and it’s difficult to isolate the effects of any policy, even one as big as a free trade agreement. It’s quite possible that U.S. companies would be investing more abroad and wages would be stagnant here at home even if the U.S. didn’t sign such trade treaties with other countries. Economics is a science that performs natural experiments with no control groups. Hard evidence is tough to come by.

Obama economist: Don’t count on the U.S. for global economic growth

One of President Obama’s top economic advisers says the rest of the world may have too much faith in the U.S. recovery.

“If your economic plan is to count on exports to the U.S. [to produce growth], that’s not a plan that I would support,” said Jason Furman, who heads the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. “What Europe needs is more growth. Clearly, domestic demand needs to pick up.”

Furman was talking on Tuesday morning at a conference put together by The Economist magazine.

The U.S. economy has been improving lately. But some have questioned if the U.S. will be dragged down by the rest of the global economy, which appears to be flatlining. Furman said that he is “quite positive” on the U.S. economy for 2015, though he joked that part of his job is to have that view, and pronounce it at conferences. He said that slower growth overseas will be a “headwind” for the U.S., but he thinks that will be more than offset by lower oil prices. He also said that average monthly mortgage and other debt payments in the U.S. are at their lowest levels in a while and that should help boost consumption.

Nonetheless, Furman said he thought the growth of the U.S. economy would not be strong enough to pull the rest of the world out of its funk. U.S. consumption makes up 70% of the U.S. economy; it’s only 5% of Germany’s economy. While the European Central Bank’s recent announcement that it would buy bonds to bring down interest rates will help the region’s economy, Furman said it won’t be enough. He said that European countries have the resources to spend money to boost their own economies, and that it is something they should consider. Last month, the International Monetary Fund downgraded its growth expectations for France, Germany, and Italy. As a whole, Europe’s economy is expected to expand at a rate of just over 1% this year, and not much more in 2016.

Oliver Blanchard, who is the chief economist at the IMF and was talking on the same panel at The Economist conference, disagreed with Furman. He said it was incorrect to say that Europe was still in austerity mode. Budgets are expanding modestly, or not shrinking. But he said that European leaders should be concerned that markets could react negatively to more fiscal stimulus measures.

Furman disagreed, arguing that leaders often say that bond investors will sell at the first sign of stimulus spending but that the market supports such measures. Fiscal stimulus moves in Japan and elsewhere have not caused bond prices to fall, and interest rates to spike, he said.

“We have to make sure we are not inventing a bogeyman who won’t show up,” said Furman. “We are way past the point in Europe where they should be doing a big fiscal stimulus.”

Keystone XL advances in U.S. Senate, faces Obama veto

(Reuters) – Republicans in the U.S. Senate made good on a pledge to pass the long-pending Keystone XL oil pipeline on Thursday, a measure the White House said President Barack Obama would veto.

Senators voted 62-36 on the bill to bypass the Obama administration’s review of Keystone, five short of the number needed to overturn a potential rejection by the president. All Republicans present voted for the bill as did nine Democrats.

Approving Keystone has been the top priority of Republicans in the new Congress after they won control of theSenate in November.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Keystone would be good for the middle class and “pump billions” of dollars into the economy.

Debate on the bill lasted most of the month with Senators engaging in an open process espoused by McConnell to debate dozens of amendments. Only a handful of the amendments passed, including one from Senator Lisa Murkowski, the chair of the energy committee, in which companies transporting crude from Canada’s oil sands would have to contribute to an oil spill fund.

Obama has raised new questions about the number of jobs it would create and said that Keystone would mainly benefit the company that wants to build it, TransCanada Corp, not U.S. gasoline consumers.

While the project would create thousands of temporary construction jobs, a State Department report said fewer than 40 workers would operate Keystone XL, once built.

Obama wants the State Department to finish determining whether the pipeline is in the national interest, but backers say the six-year-plus approval process has lasted too long. The project would bring some 800,000 barrels per day of heavy oil from Alberta and light U.S. crude to Nebraska en route to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

The House of Representatives has voted nine times to approve the project. Aides to House leaders said it was not clear whether the chamber would vote to pass the Senate bill or work out changes in conference talks.

Obama is expected to make his own decision soon on Keystone. The State Department has told other federal agencies they have until Feb. 2 to conclude their assessment of the project.

Even if Obama decides to oppose Keystone, Republicans will keep pushing. Senator John Hoeven of North Dakotaplans to attach a measure to a spending bill or other legislation later in the year that Obama would find hard to reject. “There will be other opportunities,” Hoeven said.

Why small business loves the Keystone Pipeline

Small business owners love the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline and are pushing for its approval.

The project, which would be a potential goldmine for contractors and suppliers, has the strong support of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a trade group that represents small businesses. In addition to lifting sales, the organization says the pipeline would help bring down energy prices and create jobs.

The Senate could vote on approving the pipeline, a 1,179-mile oil spigot from Canada to Nebraska, this week. Last week, the House of Representatives approved similar legislation.

However, President Obama has promised to veto any bill, saying that the decision about whether to build the pipeline is ultimately up to the State Department, not Congress. It’s almost a forgone conclusion that Congress doesn’t have the votes to override his opposition.

Critics of the controversial $8 billion pipeline say it will create an environmental hazard and increase the U.S. dependency on oil instead of cleaner sources. They also say the economic benefits are overstated.

A Pew Center for Research poll in November found most Americans support the pipeline with 59% saying they were in favor of its construction while 32% said they were opposed.

After the House of Representatives’ vote, the NFIB voiced its approval.

“NFIB applauds the House for passing Keystone XL legislation – taking a big step forward in energy independence, which will directly benefit small businesses,” Amanda Austin, NFIB’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement.

Kate Bonner, the senior manager for the NFIB’s legislative affairs, echoed her colleague. She told Fortune that energy concerns are a big concern for entrepreneurs, not only day-to-day for work, but also at home. Over the years, energy prices have topped business owners’ list of issues, she said.

Bonner also emphasized that job creation could be a boon for business along the pipeline’s route, including those in supporting industries in the area such as restaurants and retail.

“We look forward to seeing how the administration officially reacts,” she continued.

White House targets methane to slow climate change

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com

By Haley Sweetland Edwards

The White House announced Wednesday morning a new plan to cut methane emissions in the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45% in the next ten years.

The reductions will come in part from fixing leaky equipment and the intentional “flaring” of gas at oil and gas production sites, said Dan Utech, the president’s special assistant for energy and climate change, in a conference call with reporters.

By stopping such waste, the White House said it will save enough natural gas in 2025 to heat more than 2 million homes for a year. The reductions will also be good for industry and the economy, Utech added, since businesses will be able to sell that saved gas on the market.

The U.S. oil and gas industry has grown enormously in recent years, making the U.S. the world’s largest gas producer. U.S. oil production is at the highest level in nearly 30 years. Current emission from the oil and gas sector are down 16% since 1990, Utech said, but with expanding production, those levels are expected to rise by more than 25% in the next decade.

The White House’s initiative comes on the heels of several other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emission in recent years, including stricter vehicle efficiency standards and proposed limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. President Obama has vowed to reduce overall emissions in the U.S. by 26% (from 2005 levels) by 2025.

Methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas, accounts for just 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, but the gas is an estimated 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Both Utech and Janet McCabe of the Office of Air and Radiation at the EPA, emphasized that the efforts to reduce methane emissions would be part of a larger economic and public health strategy. While Utech said that the administration is “not far enough down the track” to predict whether, and how much, new rulemakings would cost industry, he expressed confidence that costs would be minimal. If the administration’s proposal is realized, it would save 180 billion cubic feet of natural gas in 2025.

McCabe said both her agency and the White House have been working closely with industry groups and other stakeholders. New rules, she said will build on existing initiatives and include new and modified sources that were not covered by the EPA’s 2012 rulemakings.

Small business owners: What’s your New Year’s resolution?

Small business owners, like everyone else, would be wise to make a few New Year’s resolutions. Entrepreneurs have so many responsibilities, from strategizing to meeting payroll to ensuring there are enough supplies, that it’s almost always possible for them to do a better job. Fortune checked in with the Small Business Administration to get a few ideas for worthwhile resolutions. Here are a few tips from Miguel Ayala, an agency spokesman.

1. Don’t be afraid to reach out for advice

One of the chief responsibilities of the SBA is, of course, to dole out advice to entrepreneurs in need of some help. Struggling? The SBA can be a resource. Its learning center hosts a library of videos about managing small businesses, online training courses and web chats with small business experts throughout the year.

“Whether you started with an SBA loan or not, have an existing business or not, our counseling services are available to all entrepreneurs to evaluate how your business is progressing, and look for opportunities to expand,” Ayala said.

2. Become a mentor and connect with others through social media

Another big SBA initiative is to help small businesses get the resources they need from district offices around the country. The organization offers in-person mentorship for a slew of different small business including businesses led by women, veteran’s and for those plagued by disaster.

Use of technology in business is an important element. “Assess your online presence,” Ayala advised small business owners. “Social media is the name of the game. What is your business doing to make sure that you not only have a website, but are using Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to grow your business? Are you connected with other similar businesses, networks, community chambers, etc.?”

3. Learn about getting a loan and scale up

Many small business owners dream about growing their companies beyond “small” to medium or large-sized operations. One way to do it, according to the SBA, is by taking out one of its loans. “Are you ready for your next step? Do you have a ‘crazy idea,’ but don’t want to risk all of your company’s resources on it?” Ayala told Fortune in advising entrepreneurs to check out the SBA loan program.

Small business owners can find out more details from the SBA’s “Facts About Government Grants” that explains the dos and don’ts for small business owners. Of course, businesses need to meet certain requirements for getting loans and grants and must report back to show that any money is well-spent. Swinging some financial assistance for your business may certainly help in 2015. “Talk to your credit union or banker about an SBA loan,” Ayala said. “Our loans don’t just help with your first step – they are there for your next step.”

What you need to know about the Keystone pipeline

Debate over the Keystone pipeline is gushing again in Washington as both sides of the controversial project try to sway its future.

The proposed pipeline, which would transport oil from the Canadian tar sand fields to the Gulf Coast, has been a political hot button for years. The heat is building up again now that the Republicans, who generally support the project’s construction, have seized control of both houses of Congress.

They are hoping to have more success is getting the pipeline approved after a number of previous attempts fell short. The most recent failure came near the end of 2014, when a Senate bill lost by a single vote.

In current push, a bill approving the pipeline passed the Senate energy committee 13-9 on Thursday. The full Senate could vote on the measure next week.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives considered a similar bill Friday for the tenth time, voting to approve it by 266 – 153. Twenty-eight Democrats joined almost every Republican to vote in favor of it.

The White House, however, has made it clear that President Barack Obama would veto the bill. His administration argues that the pipeline must be approved through proper channels, meaning the State Department.

With more political machinations to come, here’s a look at the pipeline and why it’s such a controversial issue.

What does the project entail?

Keystone XL Pipeline, as the project is officially known, would transport oil from just over the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. It involves building 1,179 miles of new pipe across the northern Plains to Nebraska, where it would connect with an existing pipeline network.

The goal is to transport up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day to refineries on the Gulf Coast and in Midwest. The sales pitch is that it would lower American dependance on foreign oil by up to 40%.

The cost of the massive project would be enormous. Original estimates put the price tag at $5.4 billion. But because of delays, the price has since ballooned to $8 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Why is it so controversial?

TransCanada, the company proposing to build the pipeline, first applied through the State Department for approval in 2008. Almost immediately, lawmakers turned the project into a huge rallying point over issues like energy dependence, the environment and jobs.

Supporters of the pipeline have used the issue to attack the Obama Administration for what they call its misguided energy and economic policies. They argue the project would create thousands of construction jobs and boost energy security. Opponents, meanwhile, have fought back by criticizing what they say is the project’s environmental impact including carbon dioxide emissions and the risk of oil spills.

“The tar sands flowing through the pipeline will result in pollution that causes serious illnesses like asthma and increases in carbon pollution – the main cause of climate change,” California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer, a critic of the bill, said recently.

Most U.S. citizens are in favor of the project, according to a Pew Center for Research survey in November. Fifty-nine percent said they favored building the pipeline while 31% were opposed.

What’s everyone saying?

Pipeline supporters, most of whom are Republicans, have vowed to push a bill approving construction through, despite the White House promising Tuesday to veto the legislation. Because the pipeline crosses an international border, the White House argues that the State Department can only give approval.

“There is already a well-established process in place to consider whether or not infrastructure projects like this are in the best interest of the country,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

In response, Canada issued a strongly worded statement in support of the pipeline and Congressional approval.

“Our position on Keystone remains the same: we believe the project should be approved,” according to Jason MacDonald, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesman. “It will create jobs for American and Canadian workers, it has the support of the Canadian and American people, and the State Department itself has indicated it can be developed in an environmentally sustainable manner.”

The head of TransCanada reacted to the veto threat, too. CEO Russ Girling said that the Obama administration’s review process appears to be endless. “The bar continues to move again and again,” he said in a statement, according to Reuters.

What’s next?

Sponsors of the Senate bill are Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va, who said that the legislation has more than 63 votes in its favor. Passage requires 60 votes. But to overturn a presidential veto, they would need the support of 67 senators. Getting enough votes appears unlikely.

That vote is expected for next week.

In the House, supporters needed 290 votes to defeat a White House veto. However, it received 266 votes on Friday.

In November, the Senate measure failed 59 to 41, just one vote shy of passage. All 45 Republicans supported the pipeline’s construction along with 14 Democrats.

Just days earlier, the House passed its measure 252-161, with 31 Democrats voting in favor of the pipeline.

In threatening to veto any legislation, the White House said earlier this week that the State Department should be the one to recommend whether to approve the pipeline, not Congress. The argument is that the pipeline would cross and international border and therefore give diplomats a big say in whether to proceed with the project.

Earlier on Friday, before the House’s vote, Nebraska’s Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit challenging the pipeline’s route. It was was victory for pipeline supporters.

The State Department responded that it would review the legality of having the pipeline built in Nebraska.

“The State Department is examining the court’s decision as part of its process to evaluate whether the Keystone XL Pipeline project serves the national interest,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement. “As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out.”

Michèle Flournoy: The next U.S. Secretary of Defense?

Monday’s news that U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is resigning sparked plenty of buzz in D.C. And whenever there is speculation in Washington about the prospect of a first-ever female Defense Secretary, one name surfaces: Michèle Flournoy.

When she left her role as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in early 2012 to spend more time with her children, she was the highest-ranking woman there. Despite the gains of women at the Pentagon, the Defense Department remains a stubbornly mostly-male bastion.

In her first stint in the Department of Defense under Bill Clinton, there were so few females that a women’s leadership lunch—which could be accommodated by a small round table—spawned conspiracy theories. A decade later, when she served Obama, there were enough women in the Defense Secretary’s office that they came to be known as “the feared clackers”—a reference the sharp sound of heels on the Pentagon’s echoing floors.

“You know you’ve arrived when someone creates a nickname for you,” she joked in an interview with me at the Fortune Most Powerful Women dinner at the State Department last spring. Her barbed humor should come as no surprise; as a child she spent Fridays on the sets of “I Love Lucy” and “The Odd Couple,” has her cinematographer Dad directed episode.

But Flournoy’s view of the world is dead serious. In our interview at a Fortune Most Powerful Women dinner in Washington last March, she worried that cuts to the defense budget were hurting the nation’s security. “It’s not a terribly peaceful environment,” she said. “We need a robust military as a deterrent.” One of her greatest national security concerns—that unsecured nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists.

Flournoy has a reputation for fitting her concerns into a broad worldview. The think tank she co-founded, Center for a New American Security, looks at issues like the nation’s growing energy independence in the broader context of America’s evolving place in the world. “In the 21st century national security has to get framed in broader terms,” she says.